Debit and Credit | Page 6

the production of beet-root sugar--which promise a larger
and speedier return, besides the enhancement of the value of the land.
But, in order to succeed in such undertakings, he wants the requisite
capital and experience. He manifests even less prudence in the conduct
of these speculations than in the cultivation of his ancestral acres, and
the inevitable result ensues that an ever-increasing debt at length
necessitates the sale of his estate. Such estates are ever more and more
frequently becoming the property of the merchant or manufacturer from
the town, or perhaps of the neighboring proprietor of the same inferior
rank, who has lately settled in the country, and become entitled to the
exercise of equal rights with the hereditary owner. There is no essential

difference in social culture between the two classes, but there is a
mighty difference between the habits of their lives. The mercantile
class of citizens is in Germany more refined than in any other country,
and has more political ambition than the corresponding class in
England has yet exhibited. The families of public functionaries
constitute the other half of the cultivated citizen class; and as the
former have the superiority in point of wealth, so these bear the palm in
respect of intellectual culture and administrative talent. Almost all
authors, since the days of Luther, have belonged to this class. In school
and college learning, in information, and in the conduct of public
affairs, the citizen is thus, for the most part, as far superior to the
nobleman as in fashionable manners the latter is to him. The whole
nation, however, enjoys alike the advantage of military education, and
every man may become an officer who passes the necessary
examination. Thus, in the manufacturing towns, the citizens occupy the
highest place, and the nobility in the garrison towns and those of royal
residence. This fact, however, must not be lost sight of--that Berlin, the
most populous city of Germany, has also gradually become the chief
and the richest commercial one, while the great fortress of Magdeburg
has also been becoming the seat of a wealthy and cultivated mercantile
community.
Instead of desiring landed property, and perhaps a patent of nobility for
his children, and an alliance with some noble country family, the rich
citizen rather sticks to his business, and prefers a young man in his own
rank, or perhaps a clergyman, or professor, or some municipal officer
as a suitor to his daughter, to the elegant officer or man of noble blood;
for the richest and most refined citizen, though the wife or daughter of
a noble official, is not entitled to appear at court with her husband or
her father. It is not, therefore, as in England or Scotland, the aim of a
man who has plied his industrious calling with success to assume the
rank and habits of a nobleman or country squire. The rich man remains
in town among his equals. It is only when we understand this difference
in the condition of the social relations in Germany and in England that
the scope and intention of our novel can be apprehended.
It would be a mistake to suppose that our remarks are only applicable

to the eastern provinces of Prussia. If, perhaps, they are less harshly
manifested in the western division of our kingdom, and indeed in
Western Germany, it is in consequence of noble families being fewer in
number, and the conditions of property being more favorable to the
citizen class. The defective principle is the same, as also the national
feeling in regard to it. It is easily understood, indeed, how this should
have become much stronger since 1850, seeing that the greater and
lesser nobility have blindly united in endeavoring to bring about a
reaction--demanding all possible and impossible privileges and
exemptions, or compensations, and are separating themselves more and
more widely from the body of the nation.
In Silesia and Posen, however, the theatres on which our story is
enacted, other and peculiar elements, though lying, perhaps, beneath
the surface, affect the social relations of the various classes. In both
provinces, but especially in Posen, the great majority of noblemen are
the proprietors of land, and the enactment under Hardenberg and Stein
in 1808-10, in regard to peasant rights, had been very imperfectly
carried out in districts where vassalage, as in all countries of Slavonic
origin, was nearly universal. Many estates are of large extent, and some,
indeed, are strictly entailed. These circumstances naturally give to a
country life in Silesia or Posen quite a different character than that in
the Rhine provinces. In Posen, besides, two foreign elements--found in
Silesia also in a far lesser degree--exercise a mighty influence on the
social relations of the people. One is the Jewish, the other the Polish
element. In Posen,